Intel has chosen to use a metal casing for the 330 Series, which should do a good job of protecting the PCB inside. This occupies the standard 2.5” form factor for SSDs, standing 9.5 mm tall. This differs slightly from some previous Intel models that use a spacer, so they can be adjusted to fit laptops that require 7 mm high drives.

click to enlargeFigure 2: Intel 330 Series SSD

Removing the top half of the casing reveals the component side of the printed circuit board, which features eight Intel 29F16B08CCME2 memory chips. These each contain 16 GB of memory, giving the drive a physical capacity of 128 GB. This is reduced to 120 GB due to over-provisioning, which is designed to make the drive last longer. When formatted in Windows, the drive offers 112 GB of usable space.

On the solder side of the printed circuit board, we only find the SandForce SF-2281 controller. There are also eight blank spaces on this side where we expect Intel will install more memory chips on higher capacity versions of the drive.